Metadata tags, stored in the <head> of your HTML source code, preserve important information about each web page, such as title, category, or publish date. Search engines, social sites, and aggregators use metadata to help people find your content. Taboola uses your metadata to accomplish two goals: optimize your recommendations for maximum RPM and enable editorial controls.
The richer and more complete your metadata, the better Taboola’s predictive engine can understand your content, optimize your recommendations for maximum engagement, and empower your editors with granular content filters.
Taboola also offers editors the flexibility to set inclusion/exclusion rules based on dates, keywords, and categories. The more metadata you implement, the more you can customize your readers’ experiences.
If you are interested in using Taboola to recirculate and recommend your own content to your users, then your web page must include at least the following metadata tags:
Minimum Requirements for Organic Recirculation
If you are interested in using Taboola to recirculate your own content to on-site users, then your web page must include the following metadata tags.
TITLE
Without implementing a title property tag, the Taboola crawler will try to extract a title from the content of your page. Instead, you can use something shorter and more engaging compared to the actual page title, especially if the title is very long.
Example:
<meta property = “og:title” content=”Engaging Headline to Bring in Readers”>
URL
Confirming the canonical link to your content ensures that we are indexing your pages correctly and referring people to them reliably.
Example:
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.site.com/news.article.html/index.htm”>
THUMBNAIL
Content recommendations with thumbnails outperform ones that are text-only. Having thumbnails also means we can place your content in more settings.
Thumbnail images should be at least 640px wide to ensure a high-quality display across recommendation placements.
Example:
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://cdn.site.com/assets/130731132504-216x164.jpg”>
Suggested Tags for Editorial Controls
Additional metadata tags can help further classify your content and provide options for editorial teams to better manage your organic recirculation.
KEYWORDS and CATEGORY
Providing tags for content keywords and categories enables you to set custom inclusion and exclusion rules for organic items that appear as part of Taboola recommendations.
Example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Major League Baseball, playoffs, Yankees”>
<meta name=”category” content =”baseball”>
DESCRIPTION
Descriptions help Taboola’s predictive engine understand the content on the page and better calculate contextual relevance for your items.
Example:
<meta property=”og:description” itemprop=”description” content=”These meta tags help web services better index and recommend online content.”>
PUBLISH and UPDATE DATES
Given the importance of timeliness for many periodical sites, publish and updated dates in your metadata help ensure that we are crawling the most recent version of your content and not recommending items that are out-of-date or irrelevant.
Publish date should be in RFC1123 (Mon, 06 Apr 2015 17:06:42 GMT) or ISO1601 (2015-04-05T23:31:32Z) format.
Example:
<meta name=”publish-date” content=”YYYY-MM-DD”>
Excluding Pages From Being Recommended
If there is a web page that you would like to remove from Taboola’s organic content recirculation, you must add the following meta tag to the page that will signal this preference to our crawlers:
Example:
<meta name=”can-recommend” content=”false”>
You can also manage excluded content items using our Backstage recommendations management dashboard.